Broken Arrow 23K M60-69: Doc Bodensteiner Leads Wire to Wire

• Doc Bodensteiner, 64, wins in 3:09:54 (13:17/mi avg), finishing nearly 5 minutes clear of runner-up Rob Houghton.
• Bill Nitzberg runs the strongest closing stretch of anyone on the podium, posting the 129th-fastest High Camp→Finish split to climb from 3rd to 3rd — but more tellingly, he erased a significant gap to Houghton that looked far wider mid-race.
• Eleven men aged 60–68 finished the course, with a spread of 2 hours 29 minutes from first to last — a testament to how differently this high-elevation, technical course extracts its toll.
• Josh Devane and Jim Buckley both came home in over 5 hours, with Buckley's 5:38:55 closing the field at a measured 23:43/mi.

Doc Bodensteiner, 64, out of Stateline, NV, made his intentions clear from the gun. Tracking the gender standings, he moved from 99th among men to 110th by Snow King, then continued sliding back through the field as the race wore on — not from fading, but because the faster male runners ahead were simply on a different trajectory. What matters within M60-69 is that no one in the group could touch him. His 13:17/mi average over a course topping out near 8,834 feet is a real number earned in thin air, and his margin of nearly five minutes over Rob Houghton tells a clean story.

Houghton, 68, from Murphys, CA, held second place with a steady 3:14:53, his gender standing actually improving slightly in the final stretch — moving from 161st back to 156th on the High Camp→Finish leg, where he posted the 139th-fastest split on that segment. Behind him, Bill Nitzberg (61, Carmel) ran a quietly impressive back half, climbing from deep in the women's field standings to post the 129th-fastest High Camp→Finish split — the sharpest closing move of the top three — and finished in 3:23:15.

Kirk Reynolds and John Edgcomb rounded out the top five in 3:30:44 and 3:47:01 respectively, while Tom Frantz and Roland Burgmann were separated by under seven minutes through the mid-pack. At the back, Bill Hunter, Steven Getzug, Josh Devane, and Jim Buckley each navigated the course on their own terms — finishing a 23K skyrace at altitude, at 60-plus, is the baseline achievement here, and all eleven crossed the line.